MOVIE REVIEW: HEREAFTER

HEREAFTER

Two of Seven Cows

If Hearafter, a new movie directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Matt Damon, was hoping to answer the age-old question of what happens after you’ve died, the answer is apparently… not much. Who would have expected the answering of the great, eternal question to be so unbelievably boring? 

             

There are probably a dozen ways to dissect this tedious waste of two-plus hours, but let’s start with the very premise. Before Eastwood and screenwriter Peter Morgan took on the subject of the afterlife, they might first have asked themselves if they really had anything to say on the topic, because here’s what they came up with: When you die there is a milky sort of place with a bright light, and everyone you’ve ever known is there waiting to say howdy. Seriously, that’s pretty much it.

             

Then there are the performances. Cecile De France plays a French journalist with a truly lovely belly button, Frankie McLaren plays twins Marcus and Jason, and Matt Damon plays a psychic who’s come to view his gift as a curse. While De France is great fun to look at and McLaren looks like a future star, Damon seems strangely lobotomized throughout. This is a depressed, utterly boring character that spends his free time listening to Charles Dickens’ audio books. Listening to Dickens may be big fun, but watching someone listen to Dickens? Not so much.

            

 What’s perplexing to me is that Hearafter is a very ambitious film that spans three continents, runs over two hours, and takes on life’s biggest mystery, and yet betrays no evidence that a great deal of thought went into it. It is completely formulaic and utterly tedious.

            

 And yet it doesn’t start that way. The opening portion of Hearafter has one of the most worthy uses of computer generated imagery that I’ve seen, recreating the tsunami that struck Indonesia in absolutely stunning fashion. If that was truly what the tsunami was like, it’s a terrifying phenomenon that may in itself be worth the price of the ticket. Just leave when that scene is done and you’ve had a good glance at De France’s belly button – you won’t be seeing it again, dang it! – and you’ll have the rest of the evening to enjoy yourself.

            

 Whether or not Hearafter should offend anyone’s religious sensibilities should be rendered moot by the fact that this is a bad movie that you shouldn’t be considering in any case, so suffice to say that this is a secular afterlife: Judge accordingly. I give Hearafter two cows who have passed on and are warning you from the great beyond to avoid this tedious bore.